Is AI ‘structurally’ a centralizing technology?
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Is AI ‘structurally’ a centralizing technology?<br>How well do you know Betteridge’s law of headlines?
theahura<br>Aug 22, 2026
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Anthropic has recently become the bad boy (negative) in Silicon Valley, in large part because the company cannot really muster enough enthusiasm about open source models to write a convincing letter about not wanting to ban them. To their credit, they tried! They wrote a letter on the subject! Unfortunately I think that made things worse, because in said letter Anthropic managed to mention China or the CCP about 12 times, and then kinda sorta argued that they did want to ban open source models after all.
What happens to models that don’t pass the safety testing? Would they…be banned?<br>This letter managed to anger approximately all of the commentariat on hackernews. I think the top two things the average HN commenter hates is 1) hypocrisy and 2) the feeling of being condescended to. And unfortunately for Anthropic, the contradictions between ‘we do not want to give our technology to bad people’ and ‘we are ok with our technology being used in a war of aggression in the Middle East’ were pretty hard to ignore.<br>A few days ago, Dario (CEO of Anthropic) posted a follow up on Twitter.<br>12 Grams of Carbon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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I think at this point I’ve mostly made my opinions about Twitter known? In case you’re new here, I find it a horrible place, an evil equivalent to a horocrux or the one ring in terms of its ability to warp and destroy even the best of men, and I wish with all my heart that the tech world would simply pick up and move to a different platform.<br>Among other things (and there are many other things) I’m always impressed by the lack of real thought that seems to go into the average Twitter conversation. I suppose that’s a given, it comes with the platform. The bird app was a thing conceived in the fires of ‘140 characters,’ and though you can put lipstick on a pig and add the ability to write longform articles, a trace of the true self exists in the false self. But man, even knowing all that, I am constantly surprised at how loud the self inflated shrieking can become.
A selection of replies to Dario’s post on Twitter. I really like that last one, it’s so close to self awareness.<br>(Also, the agents will eventually syndicate this to Twitter, where I’m sure it will be met with a reasonable and well proportioned response if the post does well)<br>Anyway, one line in Dario’s message caught my eye that I think mostly goes unaddressed. Dario writes:<br>Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation.
This is basically just stated and is then, based on my extremely limited time on Twitter, never spoken of again. But this is actually a very large claim, isn’t it!<br>First, it’s worth thinking about the background concept of the idea that technology can structurally be political at all. This is a very unintuitive idea. Most people think that technology is a tool, like a shovel or a trowel, and that it is incoherent to ask about the politics of a tool. What are we going to do next, ask about the politics of the air? It’s all inanimate! To the extent that tools have politics, they are rounded off to the politics of the user of said tool. You see this a lot in discussions about guns. Guns are good in the hands of police protecting an old woman from being mugged and bad in the hands of school shooters, that sort of thing.<br>The mistake is thinking about a single object, an instance of a thing instead of the class of the thing. Any individual gun is, in fact, an inanimate object. It will not campaign, or vote, or make extremely awkward remarks at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But guns in general are absolutely political. Yes, obviously there are gun owners who have a lot of identity wrapped up in the thing, and some very powerful gun lobbyists, and the talking heads do like to bring the subject up quite a bit around election time. And all of these people will campaign and vote, of course. But that’s not quite what I mean. If you zoom out a bit further, the existence of guns implies many things about society: that many more people can leverage violence, that the state will be pressured to become strong / more invasive / more aggressive to maintain control, that we are willing to accept that it is easier to escalate conflicts in exchange for individual choice. Given all of the above, I view guns as a structurally decentralizing technology.<br>Guns are obviously a hot topic, but this sort of logic also applies to things that seem pretty neutral day to day. For example, many of the parkway bridges in and around Long Island are built so low that they prevent buses from reaching the beaches and parks. On face,...